Spare Words and an Eerie Angelic Image

It was more Harry Truman than Thomas Jefferson: a relatively plain-spoken address that one observer likened to a country church sermon, spiked with alliteration and marked by a disdain for $2 (let alone $10) words.

Spare and unflowery as West Texas in July, George W. Bush’s coming-out soliloquy Saturday as chief executive alternately impressed, alarmed and miffed some professional persons of letters who were tuning in his performance on TV.

Some were struck by the new commander-in-chief’s temperate, conciliatory tone. Others approved of the speech’s concision (1,500 words), a sharp contrast to Clintonian verbosity and the purplish prose of many presidents.

A few praised its imagery, especially its eerily poetic invocation of an “angel riding in a whirlwind,” which Bush speech writer Michael Gerson lifted from the Revolutionary War figure John Page, possibly by way of GOP presidential candidate Steve Forbes (more on that later). At the same time, some admitted they weren’t exactly sure what that fiery, providential metaphor was supposed to mean.

Several were made uncomfortable, or worse, by the new president’s multiple allusions to spiritual powers “larger than ourselves,” and a divine author of creation “who fills time and eternity with his purpose.”

But the rough consensus among a group of literary listeners was that Bush’s brisk 14-minute oration, if not exactly a classic of its kind, was a pretty fair exercise in prose-spinning. A spirited few found it preachy, unbelievable or simply empty.

“I thought it was a good speech that was fitting for the times,” said Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote, who watched the inauguration at his home in Memphis, Tenn. “It was not an inspiring speech. It was not a celebratory speech,” but, rather, “just a reassurance that he was in charge.”

David Bromwich, who teaches English literature at Yale, described the address as “an appropriate speech for a political moderate--broad on amenable commitments, as it meant to be, and short on particulars and pledges.”

“Michael Gerson is a very able practitioner of a middle style of oratory,” Bromwich continued. “I think Gerson writes to Bush’s cadences pretty well, even more in the convention acceptance speech than this one. This was a little bit high and ripe by comparison with the convention speech.”

Los Angeles novelist Carolyn See (“Dreaming: Hard Work and Good Times in America” and “The Handyman”) thought the speech, as oratory, was “very nice and tidy . . . very tasteful and moderate.”

She added, “The diction was not terribly elevated, sort of halfway between real talk and terribly elevated talk. I thought one of the things that kept it in control was that it was packed with that kind of alliteration that really goes back to old English--’flawed and fallible people,’ ‘we share a continent, but not a country,’ ‘a pastor’s prayer,’ ‘the pain of poverty.’ ” She likened these phrases to “little sandbags on a hot air balloon,” keeping the speech from getting too lofty.

Both See and Foote thought Bush’s decision not to make mention of the bitter aftermath of the election was a wise one. “We all know” what happened, See said, so “it was kind of tasteful just to not bring up the whole subject.”

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Others found considerably less, if anything, worth praising. Watching from his home in Oakland, novelist-poet-playright Ishmael Reed (“Mumbo Jumbo”), said, “I thought it was pretty scary . . . talking about good Samaritanism as being a substitute for government programs. There’ll probably be more people in the streets and in shelters as a result of this so-called compassionate conservatism, which sounds like you don’t want to eat unless you’re Christian.”

Reed, who wrote Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s first inaugural speech when Brown was California governor in the 1970s, questioned the use of phrases such as “personal responsibility” and “abandonment and abuse” of children, which he interpreted as scapegoating code terms directed at African Americans.

He found the speech “full of platitudes and hypocrisy,” with its laudatory reference to “a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom”--given, Reed said, that the Bush administration “looks like springtime for the Confederacy.”

Francine Prose, a novelist (“Blue Angel”) and critic who lives in New York, likewise thought the address was “terrifically platitudinous.” “I also thought it was very churchy,” she said. “God was just all over it. I thought that we were supposed to have a separation of church and state in this country. It seemed like a sort of sermon that wouldn’t be out of place in a small-town church.”

Indeed, besides alluding to a male divinity and quoting Mother Teresa, the speech made reference to the New Testament parable of the good Samaritan and spoke of “needs and hurts . . . so deep they will only respond to a mentor’s touch or a pastor’s prayer.”

However, its most enigmatic and powerful religious citation came from a letter written by Virginia statesman John Page to Thomas Jefferson at the outbreak of the War of Independence. Quoting in part from the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, Page wrote: “We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?”

Bush used this excerpt near the end of his address to evoke the idea of a supreme being overseeing the fate of America. Speech writer Gerson, who formerly worked for U.S. News & World Report, also has written speeches for former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas) and former GOP candidate Forbes. In September 1997, Forbes wrote a guest editorial for Investor’s Business Daily in which he cited the same passage. Still, religious sources are hardly new to inaugural speeches.

“[Bush] invoked the creator fairly regularly, but let’s remember that so did Lincoln,” said Everett M. Ehrlich, a Washington, D.C., business and political consultant and author of the novels “Big Government” and “Grant Speaks.” “He’s comfortable with Bible stories, and he delivers that material in an unalienated fashion. He was in his zone.”

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Not many phrases in inaugural history have had the resonance, craft or moment to achieve timelessness. Among the exceptions are Franklin Roosevelt’s “nothing to fear but fear itself,” John F. Kennedy’s directive to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” and Abraham Lincoln’s somber hope at the start of his second term for a “binding up” of the nation’s wounds inflicted by the Civil War.

Gerson didn’t appear to be sculpting sentences with an eye toward seeing them chiseled in marble. But Ehrlich thinks one or two well-wrought sentiments may have staying power beyond the weekend news cycle.

“Bush is to be commended for avoiding metaphor abuse,” he said. “There was only one minute when I winced, which was when [he said] our ‘democracy was a rock. . . . [And] now it is a seed,’ and I thought democracy had diminished fairly rapidly in the space of a punctuation mark.”

Some of the writers thought Bush’s body language was stiff, lacking in the expansive affability of his immediate Oval Office forebear. “It seemed to me that the effort to be presidential was so palpable it was almost painful--the uplifted chin, the measured delivery, the pacing,” Prose said.

But Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, an author (“Reading People”) and L.A. trial consultant, thought Bush “really stepped up to the plate today” in his communication and delivery. “One thing that was clearly pleasantly missing was the smirk. He was obviously very serious in his presentation, and I think it was a much different persona than anything we’ve seen so far.”

Oscar-winning screenwriter Jeremy Larner (“The Candidate”), contacted at his home in the Bay Area, thought the speech was both well-written and well-delivered, but “it had no sense of irony, no sense of playfulness.”

Were there any phrases for the ages? Larner liked the central conceit of America’s continuing story, characterized as “a story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals.” But overall he found the speech “workmanlike” and “so abstract as to be meaningless.”

Novelist Ward Just, speaking by phone from Massachusetts, described the speech as “very carefully done, sentence to sentence.”

“It had a coherence to it that I thought was very impressive,” said the author of “A Dangerous Friend” and many other novels. Just said the speech’s opening paragraphs put him in mind of the opening of an epic novel. “I think it was quite a good aria,” he said, mixing novelistic and operatic metaphors.

As the TV networks signed off with drizzly images of the nation’s capital and the rest of America resumed its business, a speech that had taken weeks to craft already was receding into the background.

Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” suggested that’s how inaugural addresses should be.

“If we’re listening for some guidance, some words that will tell us what will happen, we’re very naive,” Zinn said. “Because the words are put together for the moment, for the ceremony, to make everybody feel good and to try to create an aura around the president of something being done. I expect to hear rhetoric and promises. But the reality will come the day after the inauguration.”

For historian Foote, the reality was that though the address didn’t compare to the best of the past, “the great speeches have usually been in times of crisis when great speeches were called for. No great speech was called for, and therefore you didn’t get one.”